The Alphabet Game

In the Disney classic Pollyanna (By the way, did you know there is nudity in that movie! In the opening credits there are little boys skinny dipping and jumping into the river from a rope swing and you see little bare bums! My faith in Disney is seriously shaken.) the lead character has a thing called the glad game. When something goes wrong she tries to think of a good thing about it. It’s a sappy idealistic classic old-time movie that has absolutely nothing to do with real life.

On my birthday a year and a half ago I was doing some of that painful-introspective-analyze-my-life-and-try-to-fix-it-in-one-swift-stroke-because-it’s-my-birthday thinking, and realized that I was miserable. But I also realized that I was unhappy because I had made it a habit. Someone would ask “How are you?” and my first inner reaction was to pick something from my pathetic life to complain about. Or my standard response was “surviving.” I realized I needed to break the habit of being unhappy. I needed something easy and simple to just catch that initial negative reaction to being asked how I was.

Eventually I came up with “The Alphabet Game” Here’s how it works. I start with A and that day I have to come up with something positive that begins with A like awesome, astounding, amazing etc. When someone asks how I am - I have to respond with a positive A word. The next day is B and so on. I even mark the days in my planner so I can keep track of where I am. If I have something that upsets me or that I want to be crabby about, I write it down in my planner on the day after Zday - the 27th day - Black Hole day. That day I can be miserable and grouchy and don’t have to try to be happy for anyone if I don’t feel like it.
The idea is that by the time I get to a day when I can be miserable about something that happened earlier, I have gained enough perspective that it no longer seems quite so traumatic. I have found that on black hole day I often can sincerely answer that I am fantastic. The next day I start back with A again.

It seems like such a silly thing - yet it has truly changed my life. It has done exactly what I needed it to do - break the habit of looking at the negative side of life. No, it doesn’t always work - and I still often get discouraged and wallow in self misery. But at least I wallow faster, like a buffalo on speed. I have to get on to the next letter. The substance of my life hasn’t changed - but my attitude and how I deal with it is completely different.

It is funny to watch people’s reactions to strange letters like Q or Z and I quickly explain the alphabet game and they get excited to try it too. There are days when the first person I’ve talked to that morning asks how I am and I have to ask them to hang on a second while I figure out what letter I am on. I even bought a little set of pre-school flashcards with the alphabet on them and have them on a bulletin board in my bedroom.
Sometimes I catch myself feeling negative and being bummed out and I realize I haven’t been playing the game as strictly as I should.

Things are far from perfect but they are so much better than they were. I have even had the shocking experience of people saying things to me like “You are always so cheerful” - Who me?! Seriously? The queen of woe-is-me, cheerful?
I could (and probably will) write numerous blogs on specific instances where the alphabet game has taken on a life of it’s own.
I said it changed my life, but the truth is, it has saved my life.

Eating Worms

When I was a little girl there was this song I used to sing whenever I was REALLY feeling worthless, which honestly was a lot of the time. It went like this:
(please feel free to sing along if you know this one)

Nobody likes me
Everybody hates me
I'm gonna go out and eat worms
Fat ones, skinny ones
Little in-betwinny ones
I’m gonna go out and eat worms

I don’t know where I learned it, or who taught it to me, it was just always there in my brain waiting to be sung. It made a great musical accompaniment to a pity party.
There are many versions of this song (yes I searched it on the internet) but they all start the same and all have the consumption of innocent nightcrawlers as the desired course of action to take when the world hates you.

I’ll return to this theme in a moment - but first a tangent that will eventually tie in.

In my class whenever I make a sentence for the students to translate I can’t do a normal sentence like: Bobby reads a book. or Betty eats potatoes. That’s boring. Who wants to translate that? So I always try to come up with something either interesting, currently applicable to the kids, funny, sarcastic, or off the wall. Preferably all of the above. It lets me give them harder, more challenging sentences that they don’t complain about. It makes for some more interesting vocabulary skills and keeps most students from snoring in class which is really rather disruptive to those students who are already asleep. So instead my sentences would be something like: Bobby tries to kiss ugly girls but they run too fast. or Betty eats worms with onions and ketchup.
In fact eating worms tends to be a re-occurring theme in my classes. I never really thought much about it or wondered why until today when I had a little epiphany.

I had just come back from another frustrating trip to the main office, I was in tears and feeling worthless and unappreciated and as I walked into my classroom I saw a sample sentence on the board and the worm song popped into my head and I suddenly saw the connection.
So much of my brand of humor and sarcasm and strange and crazy things I do in my classroom can be traced to my profound sense of worthlessness and the overcompensation and coping mechanisms developed over so many years of self loathing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching the strange way I do - It would be boring otherwise. It is just reassuring to know that something worthwhile comes out of the pain. Because somedays it just hurts so much to be alive.

It's ALIVE!

That title of course needs to be read in a 1950's black and white thriller movie voice-over voice.

When I talk to myself sometimes it comes out in a voice with a strange accent or sound. Is that weird? It probably comes from spending so much time with no one to talk to but myself. I think it might be a little unusual but the voice with the Freud accent says to not worry about it. I am sure I can find a way to blame it on my parents.

So speaking of voices - this nagging voice in the back of my head keeps telling me I should write in my blog again. (No, this is a different voice than the one that told me to shave my cat and paint her green - that one had a definite Irish accent)

So since I assume that nobody will ever read this, and I really need a therapeutic place to rant. I shall now attempt to resuscitate my blog. (Yes, I had to look up how to spell that nasty word)
I wasn’t even sure the blog would still be here. So I did a search for “Tangent Woman” and it was the first hit! Tee hee, I am famous.

Apparently there is a town in western Oregon that is named Tangent. (It’s the grass seed capital of the world!) It has a population of 1,000. So if one were to refer to a female from that town, she could technically be called a tangent woman. But she wouldn't be Tangent Woman with capital letters.
Aren’t Capital Letters Amazing Things? They can let you yell in a text or email, they can emphasize things, they translate a number into a grade, they look cool, they can turn any sentence into a title and they perform the obviously vital function of separating true super heroes from rotten pretenders.

So the voice in my head that has the Spanish accent is now telling me I should get back to grading papers. Capital F is a cool letter don’t you think?